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Games that have color problems
Dirk Chegigo
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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This is a list of games that have bits or cards that are hard to distinguish from each other because of color. Please add.
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1. Board Game: Rage [Average Rating:6.19 Overall Rank:1675]
Dirk Chegigo
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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The Red and Orange in this Amigo version are just too darn close.
 
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Dave Kudzma
United States
Gumboro
Delaware
Muffins.
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I usually remove the orange or red if we play with 4 or less just for that reason. Even in good light the shade can trick you.
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  • Posted Wed Jan 5, 2005 4:03 am
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2. Board Game: Scream Machine [Average Rating:6.05 Overall Rank:2326]
Dirk Chegigo
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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I understand there is a problem with the color scheme on this game too. Hope to get it soon so I can see for myself.
 
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Dave Eisen
United States
Silicon Valley
California
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I enjoyed playing this recently, but yes, I had a hard time telling at a glance which customers corresponded to which attractions. The others playing did not seem to have the same difficulty.
 
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  • Posted Fri Oct 31, 2003 9:28 pm
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Joe Huber

Westborough
Massachusetts
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If you do have difficulty seeing the colors, there are two other things you can look for:

1) There is text on the right hand side of ride cards indicating the category.

2) There is a small symbol on the top left of all cards; look for the same symbol.

Neither may be perfect, but either might prove useful if the colors seem unclear...

Joe
 
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  • Posted Fri Oct 31, 2003 11:32 pm
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Dave VanderArk
United States
Coopersville
Michigan
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It really isn't that hard to see the correct colors/symbols on the cards. Most people are able to see things clearly by the second game. There many other games that are harder to see than this one.
 
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  • Posted Wed Jan 7, 2004 2:42 am
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3. Board Game: Fresh Fish [Average Rating:6.68 Overall Rank:927]
Dirk Chegigo
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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Another Red - Orange problem in the Plenary Games version. Solved in later versions and there is an exchange program to get gold bits.
 
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Angela Kincaid
United States
Colorado Springs
Colorado
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the bits exchange program is still open, but the bits being returned are SILVER. And they take a slooooow boat to china.
 
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  • Posted Sat Aug 14, 2004 12:17 am
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4. Board Game: Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper [Average Rating:7.03 Overall Rank:362]
Jesse Miller
United States
Gettysburg
Pennsylvania
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Trying to play this in a dimly lit room can be difficult--some of the suit colors are just too similar.
 
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Dave Kudzma
United States
Gumboro
Delaware
Muffins.
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The tan and yellow are similar, but each card has a name to identify it. blush Ok, Ok,....I made that mistake like 3 or 4 times at first...lol.
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  • Posted Wed Jan 5, 2005 4:05 am
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5. Board Game: Liberté [Average Rating:7.24 Overall Rank:275]
Michel Fortin
Canada
Longueuil
Québec
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The blue and purple personnality cards are almost of the same color. The brown and pink cards have the same problem, to a lesser degree. The first time we played, we had to stop, spread out the various cards and actually discuss their "membership". To make matter worst, the purple cards do not match the purple on the board. When you don't have the two colors in your hand (blue and purple), it's very easy to make a mistake. I can't believe it passed the quality control tests (or even play tests), if there were any.
 
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John Rodriguez
United States
Irving
Texas
designer
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Yea... the colors on this game are absolutely horrible, just horrendous. The game itself isn't that bad (but it's not great). The color problems themselves are just completely unacceptable.
 
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  • Posted Wed Dec 31, 2003 4:37 am
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Geoff Brown
United Kingdom
Manchester
Unspecified
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Ok...There is a difference between playtests and quality control tests.

When the game map was produced it looks quite nice, lots of nice ombre shading etc...However, when the graphics guy has to take colours in an RGB format then he needed to take the colour from the map...When your dealing with shading this leads to problems (we KNOW this now)

The colours picked up by the computer looked the same, but by the time the game was printed something had changed...We didn;t get to find out until the day the games were delivered to Essen...Thats when we first see them.

We DO try....we dont use Ombre anymore...but like we have said previously, we are a bunch of gamers NOT a professional games company.

Geoff Brown
Frog Five
 
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  • Posted Mon Mar 22, 2004 8:25 am
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6. Board Game: Winner's Circle [Average Rating:6.96 Overall Rank:336]
Michel Fortin
Canada
Longueuil
Québec
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The "Red Fox" and "Nougat" plastic horses are easily confused. I understand the colors were chosen in a realistic way. It would have been strange to have blue, purple and green horses and, with seven horse colors to choose, it probably was impossible to do better.
 
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7. Board Game: Roads & Boats [Average Rating:7.69 Overall Rank:117]
Aleister Finchley
United Kingdom
Unspecified
Unspecified
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The yellow walls and the neutral(unpainted) ones look very similar under some lighting conditions. I'm going to have to paint them in a bright white.

They don't look too bad in this picture, though.
 
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8. Board Game: The Penguin Ultimatum [Average Rating:6.29 Overall Rank:2337]
Michael Rosen
United States
East Amherst
New York
I'm red/green color blind. I open this game and find purple, green, red, and brown for colors. Surprisingly, I can tell the difference between the green and red. Sadly, the brown and red look identical to me.
 
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Jim Doherty
United States
Westford
Massachusetts
designer
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There are 4 different colors in this game, and each game can be different... each game was manufactured with 4 colors chosen from red, black, green, blue, brown, and purple.

If anyone would like to swap out a color they're having problems with for another that would be easier to differentiate, simply email me here or at jim@eightfootllama.com.


 
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  • Posted Sat Nov 1, 2003 7:48 pm
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9. Board Game: The Settlers of Catan [Average Rating:7.51 Overall Rank:79]
Gert Keijer-Spaink
Netherlands
Utrecht
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The red and orange villages, roads etc etc look very much alike. When i bought my copy way way beak (i think it's a first german edition not yet published by Cosmos but by Franchk) the problem was even bigger. The orange cities were so dark that they lokked red. The publisher even put in an extr set of lighter collerd orange cities so i have an extra set of cities in an intermediate color.
 
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10. Board Game: Pompeji [Average Rating:6.36 Overall Rank:2345]
Kelly Bass
United States
Venice
California
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I think the graphics were designed so the city looks "cool" when all the cards are laid out. Unfortunately, each card only has a hint of color. I would really prefer cards with much more obvious color on each one.
 
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11. Board Game: Alhambra [Average Rating:7.05 Overall Rank:241]
Kelly Bass
United States
Venice
California
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Of the 4 currencies, blue & yellow are fine, but having burnt-orange and brown is confusing. Check out the 3 cards at the top of the picture (burnt orange, blue, brown). On another edition, they have thankfully changed brown to green.
 
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RUSH May 21st 2011
England
York
North Yorkshire
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Alhambra's precursor Stimmt So! has a colour problem - lack of it. It's very difficult telling who has what shares since they have no colour coding and the share type is written in gothic script. You have to stand up and peer at everyone's cards to know what's happening.
 
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  • Posted Sat Feb 14, 2004 8:42 am
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Lee Williams
United States
Raleigh
North Carolina
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But with Alhambra, color is NOT the only identifier on the money. Each different color also has: A different name, A different picture, AND a different symbol identifier in the corner. My brother is color blind due to laser eye treatments for diabetes side-effects and has no problem with this game. In fact, I would say this game is a good example of how to deal with the issue of color blind players. Bad games for the color blind are games like CORSARI (10 colors, very similar, no unique identifiers) and TICKET TO RIDE (symbols on the card corners but no symbols on the board). At least Days of Wonder has a plan to redo the board and correct this.
 
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  • Posted Thu Aug 12, 2004 1:48 pm
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12. Board Game: Gargon [Average Rating:6.09 Overall Rank:2062]
Mikko Saari
Finland

http://www.lautapeliopas.fi/ - the best Finnish board game resource!
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Backs of the red and purple cards are very difficult to tell apart in dimmer light.
 
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13. Board Game: 10 Days in Europe [Average Rating:6.63 Overall Rank:865]
Doug Orleans
United States
Somerville
Massachusetts
designer
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Same color problems as 10 Days In Africa, especially matching the planes to the pink & orange countries. It doesn't help that each plane card has multiple shades on it.
 
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14. Board Game: Advance to Boardwalk [Average Rating:5.26 Overall Rank:7364]
Andrea Angiolino
Italy
Rome
European Union
designer
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We used to play the Italian edition "Parco della Vittoria" at the dim and slightly colored light of a pub in Rome... You could hardly tell which metal pawn belonget to which player. Red & orange where particularly close to each other, but all four of them had problems.
 
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Ginny Pickard
United States
Avon
IN
The US version that I have has the following slightly rubbery plastic tokens:
yellow sailboat
grey bicycle
maroon roller skate
red baby carriage

All are very narrow to fit on the spaces, and fall over often. The colors chosen are easily distinguishable, but they're not very pleasing to the eye
 
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  • Posted Sat Oct 16, 2004 2:35 am
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15. Board Game: Cosmic Encounter [Average Rating:6.99 Overall Rank:361]
Eric Nielsen
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
Cosmic Encounter has extremely poor color selection and printing, by using gradients instead of solid colors.

The only reason it's not colorblind-hostile is because the game is designed around chaos and imbalance. A colorblind player selecting random tokens to make random attacks actually helps the game.

At least one color-normal player should be involved in every game to identify when somebody has won.
 
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16. Board Game: Memoir '44 [Average Rating:7.56 Overall Rank:61]
Jim Cote
United States

Maine
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Could have been slightly better constrast.
 
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Richard Irving
United States
Salinas
California
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Make sure the pieces are always pointing towards the opponent!
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  • Posted Sat Oct 30, 2004 3:06 pm
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17. Board Game: Mermaid Rain [Average Rating:6.53 Overall Rank:2266]
Hans Persson
Sweden
Linköping
Unspecified
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This comes with pieces in white, yellow, green, and blue. So far so good. Then there's a red one and a very dark pink one. If the light's good I can tell they are different, but not which one is which. But then I'm not color blind.
 
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18. Board Game: Excalibur [Average Rating:6.36 Overall Rank:2445]
Hans Persson
Sweden
Linköping
Unspecified
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There are chits for six players. One pair is blue and blueish-green. One pair is red and slightly-purplish-red. The last pair is tan and orange. Up to four players should be fine, and five probably in good light, but I wouldn't want to try it with six.
 
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19. Board Game: Prize Property [Average Rating:5.63 Overall Rank:6347]
Bob Wilson
United States
Northampton
Massachusetts
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Prize Property is an old, hardly played game, but a great one... except for the horrible closeness of the red and orange buildings.

Luckily in this game, each player is developing only within a given quadrant of the gameboard, so it limits the confusion.
 
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20. Board Game: Railroad Tycoon [Average Rating:7.69 Overall Rank:45]
 
Bob Wilson
United States
Northampton
Massachusetts
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I'm shocked no one added this item yet. Railroad Tycoon (RRT) is one of the worst offenders.

You have:

1.)
A map with shockingly-close Purple and Blue cities for the color-challenged (and even the "normal sighted") to distinguish.

2.)
Color cubes to deliver, again with the Blue-Purple problem, but not as bad.

3.)
Suggestions that the next version will have a fix, but players creating their own in the meantime. Some of them, like the image included with this post, are almost as bad as the original.

What's needed is some science (usability experts, interface designers, etc.) to tell us which colors, and in one place on the gray-scale (1 to 10 from light to dark) are best destinguished by even the smallest minority of the color-challenged.

There are many types of color-blindness, and there are as many as 16 genes effecting it. So there must be a set of colors which is visible and distinguishable by just about everybody.

Anyone have any empirical data to share on the matter?
 
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21. Board Game: Mago Magino [Average Rating:6.33 Overall Rank:3359]
Sue Hemberger

Washington
Dist of Columbia
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Knizia kid's game. Red and orange are hard to distinguish. Otherwise, nice bits.
 
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22. Board Game: Arkham Horror [Average Rating:7.57 Overall Rank:68]
Nick


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The color on the backs of the encounter cards don't perfectly match up with the colors on the board, so until you get used to it, you have to compare (usually just the browns) and choose which one makes the most sense from the choices. (It doesn't really matter, because if you guess wrong your location wont be listed, but still... it bothers me)
 
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23. Board Game: 10 Days in Africa [Average Rating:6.60 Overall Rank:876]
Dirk Chegigo
United States
Salt Lake City
Utah
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Pink and Orange on the cards are almost identical. There is a better contrast on the board.
 
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Scott Starkey
United States
Dayton
Indiana
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publisher
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So this begs a question to our colorblind 'geeks: "What colors would you prefer publishers use for their pieces?" As a small-fry publisher, I would be interested in knowing that!
 
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  • Posted Wed Nov 5, 2003 3:44 pm
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Scott Russell
United States
Clarkston
Michigan
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I think maybe brightness is the key. I am red/green/brown and blue/purple colorblind. Dark red and light green are completely different to me, but if they are both dark, forget it. When they are different darknesses, I may not be able to point to which player is Red, but I can tell which player is that light red/green color. :-)

Another pet peeve mentioned above here is to have families of colors like in 10 Days in Africa. The cards don't match the board. Now if you know that this card is green and the board is a slightly lighter shade, but still green that works for non-color-blind people, but doesn't do a thing for us spectrally challenged individuals. Other games group the green pieces (light, mid and dark) as a faction and that isn't useful to me. If the shades are all different from each other, I can memorize which go together though.

I can't stress icons enough. They rule. When I have a card game that I enjoy except for the color, I rubber stamp little icons (maybe even in matching colors ) on the cards to tell them apart.

And don't feel bad, Yekrats, one of Mayfair's major playtesters is colorblind and they still put out games that don't work colorwise. angry

Happy Gaming,
 
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  • Posted Wed Jan 7, 2004 4:12 pm
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Matthew Frederick
United States
Phoenix
Arizona
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This doesn't work with painted cubes and such, but for printed colors it can help a lot to open your image in Photoshop (even if it's a PDF or an EPS or what have you), choose Image=>Adjustments=>Hue/Saturation, and slide the Saturation all the way to the left (no color saturation). If there are grays that look identical to you at that point then there's a pretty fair chance someone's not going to be able to tell them apart, especially if they're the common pairs. Adjust the brightness levels of one of the confusing colors and try the exercise again... eventually you'll end up with colors that still look decent to those who can see color but that can also be differentiated (generally) by the color-blind.
 
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  • Posted Wed May 12, 2004 1:08 am
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Eric Nielsen
United States
Boston
Massachusetts
If color is the only identifying characteristic, limit the palette to the fully saturated Crayola 8

Secondary clues are the best solution. Icons, shapes, fill patterns, outlines, etc, all work wonderfully. Even if they are subtle, we will notice them.
 
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  • Posted Wed Aug 11, 2004 1:56 am
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Jae
United States
Bryan
TX
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To answer the question of what colors to use, don't use hues close to each other.

The colors I prefer (for six players):

White and/or Black (depending on special pieces)

if you can't use white and/or black, I've included two extra colors that *should* be colorblind friendly:

-stopsign Red
-Teal (light blueish green, more green than blue)
-Navy Blue (a medium to dark blue, almost smurf or ocean colored)
-Electric Neon Yellow (or bright construction yellow)
-hunter green
-pumpkin orange

(construction yellow also contrasts well with construction orange and construction red)

and of note, the green and yellow on BGG are poor color combos
 
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  • Posted Wed Aug 11, 2004 10:41 pm
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